Category Archives: Geek

Tailinator – a log file monitor for Windows

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Yes, Tailinator, not Mailinator. It’s weird how things happen. I went to news.google.com and searched for mailinator. It said “Did you mean: tailinator ?”. I clicked it – wondering what tailinator is and it gave NO results which I thought was weird – why would it suggest it if it gave zero hits? So I Searched Google for tailinator and it turns out it is a really good freeware log file tailer for Windows! I need one of those!

I played with it a bit today and it works great! It’s basic, but does the job nicely – it can open mutiple files in tabs, flashes when a file has changed, you can choose to load the whole file or just the last X bytes, and it can autoload a log or logs at startup. Tailinator seems to have no website listed in it and I can’t find its “home on the web”, but you can find it if you just search google for tailinator. So, a search for Mailinator gets me a log monitoring utility called Tailinator.

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Anatomy of the Mailinator slashdotting

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So, our Spam Map was slashdotted today and it was my first time experiencing it firsthand from the server side. I thought I’d share some interesting things that happened today. Just over 12 hours ago, (it’s now about 9:40PM) we were put on slashdot. As of right now, our hit counter for the page is at 99083 – almost 100K hits in a 12 hour period. WOW! By the time I finish this post it may very well clear 100K.

How did we handle it? Well, we are running a custom-made Java web server, written from scratch by Paul – this is running under Jetty as our servlet engine/webserver. Around 10:30AM EST, we REALLY started getting pounded. We started getting LOW ON THREADS warnings and then OUT OF THREADS warnings from org.mortbay.http.SocketListener.isLowOnResources. At that point, the server melted. We bounced the server and it ran out of threads almost immediately. POUNDED. Surprisingly, my map code and Paul’s mail code held up very well. Of course, Paul’s mail code handles a million emails a day and sometimes over 3 million a day, so his code was never in doubt.

As I write this, hits are now at 99283…

So the server ended up being down and out for a short period of time – 15 minutes total maybe? Which I thought was pretty damn good. One thing we did was make sure that the map page itself (and the data file it loads) was NOT a JSP page. We just served up static content essentially – no extra processing. A thread ran in the background to update the data file periodically. If the map page were a JSP getting the data dynamically, I’m sure it would have failed much sooner and for much longer.

99358…

The hardware is a dedicated server from ServerBeach. I don’t know the specs but can find out if anyone is interested.

Just read some emails and the hit counter is now at 99709

What else?…..
Oh – I thought this was kind of interesting…with all the traffic today – lots of people were trying out the system by sending a test mesage to mailinator. MANY of them sent an email with the word test as the subject. BUT…..that triggered our spam filters because we got hundreds of emails with the same subject so we started rejecting (bouncing) them as spam. Of course, these people then assumed that mailinator doesn’t work. So, if you are testing it, send a message with a subject other than test.

OK, that’s it for now. I’ll add on more stuff later as/if I think of it. Oh – maps don’t seem to work in Safari – gotta look into that….and the map popups in IE are centered when they should be left-justified. Minor problems I need to fix.

Counter at 99850…ok – let me wait til it crosses 100K…
10:10PM – 99922
10:12PM – 99991
10:13PM – 100021 !!!!!
9:34AM to 10:13PM – 12 hours and 39 minutes to reach 100K hits

Man, this was fun! I used to dream about creating something that was cool/geeky enough to get slashdotted and it has now happened! Cool.

Project done – Spam Map

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Well, after losing a lot of sleep this week, I finally finished the project I have been working on. It’s a Google Map hack – Spam Map. It maps the worst spammers that send mail to Mailinator. I think it’s freakin’ cool (of course, I’m biased). Poking around seeing who is sending what spam from where is addictive somehow.

UPDATE: slashdotted! Cool! my first slashdotting! Server is down now (of course).
UPDATE2: server is up and running smoothly again – the intial “just got into work, must check slashdot” wave took it out, but it’s good now.

If you like it, Digg it.

After playing with it for the past week or so, I have learned that the majority of spam to Mailinator comes from the NorthEast US and not overseas as I would have assumed. I wonder if that’s true for spam in general?

So…you saw it here first – an email/spam Google Map Hack. Mark my words, in 3 months from now, everyone will have a Spam/Email map. :) Let’s see how long it takes for one of the Mailinator clones to make their own spam map.

I’ll do a post about my thoughts on the Google map API soon…

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Some great cover songs by Chance – free downloads

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I have had these for a while and thought I’d share them. They are some really good covers done by a band called Chance. If you only try one, try the Milkshake cover – it is an all-out rock cover of the hip-hop song Milkshake by Kelis. The other two songs are really good too – try them all!

UPDATE: These links are broken….read the second comment below to see why. If anyone has webspace/bandwidth to host these MP3s, let me know.
UPDATE2: Here are the songs temporarily – the link is probably slow, but at least you can get them. PLEASE do not link to the songs directly, link to this post.

UPDATE3: I’m giving Coral Cache a try now – let me know if the links work for you or not

These are direct MP3 links from the Coral Cache:
Milkshake cover (MP3) – 4.6MB
Creep cover (MP3) – 4.8MB
When Doves Cry cover (MP3) – 6.1MB

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Ancestor podcast novel has begun

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I am so psyched! Scott Sigler has started the Ancestor podcast novel. He previously did Earthcore which was fantastic, and now he’s podcasting his other novel, Ancestor. I listened to the first episode Monday in the car on the way home from work. It sounds like it will be as good as Earthcore. Both books are being podcast for FREE so try them out! Earthcore is finished so just go grab the whole thing all at once. Ancestor just started so you can get it on it now from the beginning.